Bluetooth documentation update for Personal Area Networking
The daemon for handing bluetooth PAN that was
proposed last week
is imported in NetBSD-current now, and will be part of the
upcoming NetBSD 5.0 release. Ian Hibbert has also
updated the Bluetooth chapter in the NetBSD Guide
with examples of a PANU (Personal Area Networking User)
client. Ian will also continue to work on NAP (Network Access Protocol)
and/or GN (Group ad-hoc Network), but that's some work todo.
If anyone wants to help Ian out, feel free to contact him
- see
his posting
for more details on the basic setup.

P.S.:
For those wondering how to get single pages formatted, here's a little excursion
in *roff, the formatting language that Unix manual pages
are written in. Take src/bin/ls/ls.1 as an example. To get
a formatted page in ASCII output, use:

Yet another NetBSD/Xen guide
I've been slacking on this one, but here it is:
Michael Dexter has
posted about
his NetBSD Xen Guide.
It describes setup of NetBSD/Xen, including the required
packages and kernels, how to setup the GRUB bootloader,
and how to configure the privileged Dom0 as well as an unprivileged
domU.
Further topics coviered include how a domU can be given special
privileges, and a section for the adventuresome among us
tells how FreeBSD and OpenBSD can be setup as domUs.

About localization (l10n), and translations
A question was asked about what's needed to add
localization for a new language in NetBSD, and
Takehiko Nozaki
answered,
giving hints at the various places in NetBSD's source
tree that are related to internationalization (i18n)
and localization (l10n), including
the libc message catalog and sysinst.

Maybe that's of interest for parties who want to help
out in translating those parts of the NetBSD operating
system.
BTW, while here: at www@, we receive regular inquiries about help
with translating NetBSD's website and the NetBSD Guide
into other languages. Unfortunately doing one-shot translations
is one thing, maintaining them is quite a different beast. Experiences
from the past have shown that those translations are usually not
maintained after an initial translation effort, and stay outdated.
As a consequence, the NetBSD project has decided that we will not
put efforts into maintaining translations in the future. People who
want to translate parts of NetBSD's website or any of the guides
(NetBSD Guide, pkgsrc guide) are welcome to do so when they are also
hosting them at their site. Please talk to www@NetBSD.org for linking
to those external translations then. Thanks!

Creating an unprivileged Solaris domain (DomU) with NetBSD/Xen as Dom0
NetBSD/Xen works fine for both NetBSD as guest domain (domU)
and as privileged domain (dom0). Those interested to run NetBSD
as dom0 and Solaris as domU may be happy about Tobias Nygren's
posting, which hints at his update to the
NetBSD/Xen HowTo,
which now also describes
creating an unprivileged Solaris domain (DomU).

Composing characters in screen(1)
Here's another gem from the "learn something new every day"
that scrolled by on #NetBSD. Those of us who live in a non-7bit-ASCII
world occasionally need to type some funky characters like
Ä, ü, ß or some even more esoteric things that
are mostly composed of two parts. Did you know that you can compose
those inside screen(1)?

Here's how to get an "ä" (assuming standard screen key
bindings): ^A^V:a

^A^V will get you into "digraph" (character composing) mode,
and :a will get you the resides character.

IPFilter + UPnP on NetBSD HOWTO
Jared McNeill writes me that
Xbox Live now requires a
UPnP-IGD
(Internet Gateway Device)
compliant router to function properly. Since the static ruleset s had
in ipnat.conf (based on details from a Microsoft Knowledgebase article) no
longer work, a UPnP-IGD solution is now required.

The article starts easy with an overview
of poossible approaches, but then goes quickly into
details of the autoconfiguration system, kernel startup,
bus operations, interrupts and drivers
for the system clock and the serial chip.
He concludes with his
Observations and Comparison with Linux Porting Efforts:
``I've done a few Linux ports before, and the adaptation of NetBSD went at least as smoothly as any of the Linux efforts. In fact, I found NetBSD to have several advantages that made it substantially easier to port to a new platform than Linux, especially for a "newbie" like myself with no previous NetBSD porting experience.''

What else to say? (Nothing, right! :)

While at the topic of porting NetBSD and adding device drivers:
One thing that needs doing in that process is choosing major/minor
device numbers and sort them into tables for block/character
devices. The article mentions an interesting webpage that's
relevant here:
The Auto-Generation Block/Character Device Switch Tables by config(8)
by MAEKAWA Masahide. Yai!